Southern California—and Hollywood in particular—has long been the bane of “serious novelists” hoping to make it. There have been notable exceptions, of course, like Raymond Chandler, who named and shamed the Santa Ana winds, and Joan Didion, who memorialized freeway paranoia, treating the goings-on in the lotus gardens of Eden as a worthy fictional subject. But literature set on the West Coast (or, even worse, in the film and television “Industry”) too often invites eye rolls from the “quality lit” crowd, to use satirist Terry Southern’s sardonic phrase.
It’s all the more remarkable, then, that Lauren Rothery’s debut novel, Television, hits the mark with unerring accuracy, understanding, and—dare we say it—affection, however measured.
The seemingly preposterous plot details the adventures of Verity, an archly named aging film star. Bored with the trappings of success, he holds a lottery for the $50-million-plus salary from his latest movie, open to the general public. Buy a ticket, send in proof with your name and address to the studio, and who knows? You may be the lucky winner. Helen, his long-suffering best friend and sometime lover, who makes up for in smarts what Verity lacks in judgment, bears witness to his antics—including, but not limited to, his affair with Nina, an absurdly younger actress.
On the sidelines of these interlocking tales, Phoebe, an aspiring screenwriter, struggles with the competing urges of art for art’s sake and the commercial necessities of media success. That said, the throughlines of the narrative are less engaging than the interplay of dialogue between these troubled but somehow valiant characters.
Verity is not just another pretty face who arrived in Hollywood on a bus and somehow hit the jackpot. A semirecovering alcoholic (sober when he’s in the mood), he hits a car wash when he’s trying to decompress and summons nostalgic memories of Helen, even when he’s banging Nina on the side.
When he and Helen team up, as in a close encounter with an annoyingly successful screenwriting couple at a restaurant, the vibe is deadly.
“The thing about you two is, you’re brilliant,” Verity expostulates. “Brilliant. Of course you are.… And you’re a couple of dirty sellouts.”
“But surely you know,” he adds, for good measure. “If you’re gonna sell out, go ahead. Just don’t be fishy about it is my motto.”
Later, Helen, not to be outdone, piles on:
“I’ll admit,” I said, turning my sail against the wind, “when I saw your movie and all that advertising and all, I took it sort of personally too.… It’s a horrible experience to lose respect for someone you love.”
Hemingway’s Robert Cohn, squirming in a Paris café, comes to mind, as does Salinger’s Seymour Glass, in a Miami elevator, warning a fellow passenger not to stare at his feet. Not to mention Albee’s George and Martha and their admission of interdependence.
After their victims finally summon the strength to tell Helen to fuck off, Verity and Helen retreat to their hotel room, quoting lines from Antony and Cleopatra. They may not be for everyone’s taste, but they certainly have the courage of their pretensions.
Phoebe, whose narrative runs alongside theirs, often with excerpts from her screenplay, has a febrile intelligence bordering on preciosity. (It’s probably coincidental that she shares the same name as Holden Caulfield’s younger sister, though.)
Having decamped to France to pack up her grandparents’ home, she reflects—from a considerable distance—on the aging process. As she narrates, “When I watched a movie, if I was alone, I paused on close-ups of the actresses,” looking up “how old they were when the movie was released” and subtracting “a year to account for postproduction. Jeanne Moreau was thirty-three in Jules et Jim. Meryl Streep was twenty-nine in Manhattan.”
Her own draft of a screenplay falters, except when her female lead gets into a spirited argument over a book called This Is a Simulation and its thesis that we poor players are strutting on a predetermined technological stage.
Rothery has a gimlet ear for dialogue and the myriad ways unhappy people, no matter the generation, find to torture one another.
But her vision is not really dystopian—we’re a long way from The Day of the Locust and other fictional depictions of presumed vulgarity. (Perhaps The Last Tycoon is a distant relative, though—like Verity, Fitzgerald’s Monroe Stahr cuts a tragic but not unappealing figure.)
Induced to host yet another lottery, Verity agrees but stakes out territory of his own, with a nod to the novel’s title.
“Some people you meet them and you imagine this movie together,” he reflects. “Other people, what you imagine isn’t a movie, because it keeps going. It’s television. Maybe that won’t make sense to you if you’re twenty and used to watching about three hundred things at one time, but television was when you wanted to tune in every Monday night at eight o’clock, week after week, for years. Even after the whole series ended, you’d tune in for the reruns.… It didn’t need to be sexy. It was romantic.”
Helen and Verity reaffirm their connection and their desire to unplug from the Skinner box of success, however loosely defined. In that spirit, no spoilers here, but let’s just say that they sail off into the sunset together. And, oh yes, Phoebe finds an entry into dreamland without compromising her artistic vision. It’s a Hollywood ending.•
Paul Wilner is a longtime journalist, poet, and critic who lives in Monterey County. He is the former editor of the San Francisco Examiner Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle Style section and managing editor of the Hollywood Reporter. His work has been published in the Paris Review, New York Times, ZYZZYVA magazine, Barnes and Noble Review, Los Angeles Times and many other publications.
